Due to widespread school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, the College Board administered online Advanced Placement (AP) exams to millions of students around the globe from May 11 to May 22. Now, they are faced with a class-action lawsuit. Tensions first arose when the first week of testing ended disastrously. Thousands of students stood up furiously from their laptops after facing various issues with the exam submission process–issues that resulted in what they felt was the complete disregard of a school year’s worth of learning and dedication toward earning college credit.

“It was frustrating that I had spent so much time on a response and felt confident about it, but then the technical difficulties meant that I will have to retake for no good reason,” John Michael Hatheway (’21) said after being unable to submit his AP Physics exam.

Baker, Keener & Nahra LLP and Miller Advocacy Group filed the lawsuit in a federal district court in Los Angeles, Calif. “Class-action” cases like this one seek to provide relief to large numbers of individuals who suffered from a single corporation’s wrongdoings. Hence, plaintiffs included students who experienced glitches while taking their exams and FairTest, an organization that fights against the standardized testing system as a faulty measurement of success. Together, these groups are insisting that the College Board pay upwards of $500 million in monetary relief and allow affected students to resubmit their exam responses. If found guilty, the not-for-profit will be held to charges of breach of contract, gross negligence for overseeing predictably defective tests and violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination against both the mentally and physically impaired.

When designing the 45-minute exams, the College Board implemented multiple ways for work to be turned in, including attaching a file, taking pictures of hand-written papers or simply copying and pasting from another document. If a student failed to submit due to technological problems or external interruptions, they were instructed to fill out a request for the retake in June. 

While all three of these options seem perfectly doable in the allotted five minutes, many students were  greeted by an eternal loading screen or a dysfunctional “submit” button at the end of their test. Additionally, those who chose to attach their answers as files but failed to use one of the proper formats (.txt, .doc, .docx, .pdf or .odt) were later devastated to find out the consequences of their error.

In response to the fiasco, the College Board encouraged all AP students to take certain measures, such as updating their internet browsers and uninstalling plug-ins, before attempting their next exam. They also added the ability to submit answers via email as a last resort. Nonetheless, those who had already fallen victim to technology issues throughout the first week continued to be overlooked.

The outcome of this case still remains unclear. However, the College Board rebuts arguments about their capacity to foresee and prevent these problems with the fact that 91 percent of the students they surveyed during the initial shutdown of schools would prefer an online version of their AP exams over scores being cancelled altogether. Furthermore, in a statement given after the lawsuit’s filing, Peter Schwartz, College Board’s general counsel, professes that “[The lawsuit] is wrong factually and baseless legally; the College Board will vigorously and confidently defend against it, and expect to prevail.”